Latest Lessons

My biggest challenge on a daily basis is addressing 30-plus young teenagers at a time and maintaining their attention and focus by keeping them engaged and captivated with the subject matter at hand. In this column, I’d like to share an approach I’ve developed and taken with my students that helps keep them motivated to pay attention, practice and explore the instrument more on their own time.

Here's another exclusive video lesson by guitarist Bill Hudson of Circle To Circle. It's a continuation of Hudson's last lesson, where he showed you how to play one of his new solo tracks, "E.G.O." In the first clip, Hudson played the entire song all the way through. You can check out the second part of the lesson below.

Hello. My name is Mark Hale, and I teach general music and guitar to elementary school students, grades K-4, in Nashville. Having done this for a few years and experimented with various approaches, I have come up with what I believe to be a very effective and fun approach to teaching young, beginner-level students how to tap into the creative part of their brains and improvise melodies. I’d like to share this approach with you.

Hey, everyone. In my last two blog posts, I discussed arpeggios and how to incorporate them into your playing to learn the fretboard and add some color to your leads. This time, I'd like to discuss some really cool major- and minor-scale exercises that will help your overall guitar playing on many levels.

Hybrid picking—the practice of interspersing flatpicked notes with notes plucked by your middle or ring finger—is a technique that many metalheads mistakenly believe is just for country, blues and jazz players. The fact that it remains underutilized by the shred guitar community means that hybrid picking can be smartly employed as a shredder’s “secret weapon”— just ask Zakk Wylde, John 5, Jason Becker ...

In the era of YouTube, and with the ubiquitous presence of camera phones and inexpensive digital recorders capturing almost every mundane moment of modern life, it’s difficult to imagine a musical genre or group of talented musicians remaining undiscovered.

My first two ear training columns (Part 1 and Part 2) outlined techniques intended to strengthen your note-recognition abilities, using the guitar as an ear training tool. This month, I’d like to turn you onto some ear training techniques that use chords.

For our final lesson on chromatics, I thought I'd throw you a little curve and give you a few odd-meter exercises in 5/8. Now you might ask, "Why play anything in 5/8?" Well, I came up with this sequence because it's easier for me to play across the strings.

One of the first scales many guitarists learn is the minor pentatonic scale. Though it is a staple of the rock and blues worlds, many guitarists tend to leave this scale behind when they begin to explore the jazzier side of the music world. While there are a number of scales and modes one needs to learn when studying jazz guitar, we don’t need to forget the material we’ve learned in our rock and blues playing when jumping the fence to the jazz world.